In 1969 I graduated with a PhD on Barthold Heinrich Brockes.
This thesis corrected errors about his work and revealed sources previously unknown.
At the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1996 I read articles about Brockes in some of the
latest encyclopaedias which repeated the original errors. I wrote to the editor
of Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians about the article on Brockes by K.J.Snyder.
The bibliography was out of date by about twenty years. The article did not give
a complete picture of Brockes’ contribution to music. Two articles on Brockes
and music by Harold P.Fry and my work were not mentioned. In order to demonstrate
that I was qualified to criticise their article I mentioned my work on Brockes:

I also enclosed assessments of my work by three eminent professors of German:
The late Professor Mason of Edinburgh University wrote a recommendation for the
Association of Commonwealth Universities.

Dear Sir,
Miss Ida Kimber, about whom you enquire, has recently completed for me an exceptionally
brilliant PhD thesis on the important 18th century poet Brockes and his antecedents.
This work, which owing to purely technical reasons, has not yet been officially
presented and cannot under our regulations be accepted before next June, displays
an extraordinary range and depth of erudition. Miss Kimber takes within her scope
the entire phenomenon of deism and pantheism as they manifest themselves not only
in literature, but also in philosophical and theological writings in all the major
European languages through the 17th and 18th centuries. Miss Kimber distinguishes
herself alike through her meticulousness and through her perception of wider issues,
problems and relationships. She could not have produced her thesis without being
thoroughly familiar with English as well as German 18th century literature; one
of the most important results she arrives at is that English influences were all-important
for Brockes’ development and achievement. She has, of course, the full background
knowledge of English literature and culture that belongs to the more specialized
field of her interests.

From W.H. Bruford, Fellow of St. John’s College and Emeritus Professor of
German in the University of Cambridge, 10 June 1970.
Your dissertation on Brockes has interested me very much. You seem to me to have
shown clearly that mixed as his work certainly is, much of it is really impressive
and has been underestimated. I suppose that very few Germanisten read more than
a small selection from his Irdisches Vergnügen because it is so enormous
and inaccessible, so we depend very much on the judgement of earlier generations.
Your point about his capacity for the sublime is well established by your examples
and it is quite astonishing a) at the time and b) alongside so much by the same
writer which is thoroughly philistine in tone and extremely boring. It helps a
great deal to realize that he knew so much about the Boyle lecturers and the Royal
Society people, was in sympathy with the new sort of piety in students of natural
history and influenced by the Platonic tradition in his view of nature. Your new
discoveries about the sources of certain poems are indisputable and valuable in
themselves, but the immense amount of reading you have done round the subject,
when once stimulated by those finds has been most fruitful too. I am very glad
that through MLRA it is likely to be published before very long and I am sure
it will have a considerable influence.

From Professor S. Prawer, Queen’s College, Oxford, on my introduction to
Brockes’ translation of Thomson’s Seasons.
This is clearly an important contribution to our knowledge and understanding of
Anglo-German literary relations…

Grove wrote and asked whether I would be willing to write about Brockes for the
next edition of 1999. I sent my article to meet their deadline and several months
later they sent me the article they were to publish. It was concocted from the
original article and my new one and was therefore the work of three people. I
complained to the editor of Grove and was told in a letter of 16 August that I
had been asked to contribute a revision of the old article, not write a completely
new piece. A Letter 22 April mentions a new article.
The root of the problem is the understanding of the word update which for me means
inclusion of the latest research and a total picture of Brockes' position in the
musical life of Hamburg. Their proposed article though improved by including some
of my material was still incomplete. In an undated letter the editor Stanley Sadie
emphasised the importance of being up to date in line with recent research. Their
articles on Brockes were not up to date
The publicity pamphlet on their new edition - The Grove and the New Grove Dictionary
of Music and Musicians praised their dictionary’s excellence and accuracy.
It was also highly praised in the New York Review as the greatest musical dictionary
ever published. Mr Walton in the Scotsman also offered high praise.

My new article for Grove
Barthold Heinrich Brockes, born Hamburg 1680 son of a wealthy merchant. After
completing his studies in law at Halle and Leyden, Brockes returned to Hamburg
in 1704 and chose to devote himself to literature and music. Initially he organised
concerts but in 1708 his occasional poems for weddings and other festivities were
set to music and led to further commissions. The most popular and widely performed
work was his oratorio: Der für die Sünde der Welt gemarterte und sterbende
Jesus. It was written in 1712 and performed the same year in Brockes’ house.
The work was set to music by 11 different composers: Kaiser 1712, Telemann 1716,
Handel 1716-17, Mattheson 1718, Stölzel 1720, Fasch 1723, and others. Bach
and his sister copied down Handel’s version and used some of the text in
the St John Passion (1724). The oratorio was tremendously popular and up to 1727
there were said to be 30 editions with further editions after that.
The next work to interest composers such as Handel and Telemann were some early
poems from Brockes’ Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott (1721-48/R1970). The
theme of this work is the glory, majesty and power of God manifest in creation,
a theme we are familiar with through James Thomson’s Seasons (1726-30) first
translated into German by Brockes in 1745. In the same vein are F.W. Zachariae’s
Tageszeiten (1757), set by Telemann, and Haydn’s Creation (1799) and Seasons
(1801). Brockes’ nine volumes of the Irdisches Vergnügen bring together
ideas and motifs from many sources which will later become literary commonplaces.
One such is his use of the sublime. Aspects of nature--such as mountains--which
were previously seen as a blemish in God’s creation were considered awe-inspiring.
This is to be found in Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth (1681 in Latin,
Eng. Trans. 1684), some lines of which Brockes versified in several poems.
The different style and inspiration of the Irdisches Vergnügen required different
musical treatment and stimulated interesting views on aesthetics, namely the relationship
between the arts which G.E. Lessing dealt with later in his Laokoon (1766). Mattheson
and his friend Fabricius felt that those poems of Brockes which expressed violent
movements and used onomatopoeia were unsuitable for setting to music. Instead,
calm movement, pleasant thoughts and melodies were more appropriate to move the
soul and edify. They particularly disliked sounds relating to flies, bees and
beetles. For Brockes these were part of God’s wonderful creation. Mattheson
subjected the settings by Handel and Telemann of nine of these poems to these
criteria and disliked Telemann’s treatment of sounds at the cost of melody
and inner truth; Handel escaped such criticism probably as he only used parts
of the poems in his Neun Deutsche Arien.
Brockes was extremely important for Hamburg’s cultural and literary life
for all these reasons. His house concerts and arrangement of other musical events
brought together musicians and audiences of high status and influence and increased
the demand for music. New composers were encouraged. His political life helped
too. Through him Telemann was appointed musical director and took up his post
in 1721 further improving the musical scene. Brockes died in 1747.